22 November 2014 • 16:56:18 MST

Why did voters shoot down a 911 tax for Flathead County?

As I expected, yesterday’s hand recount of the 911 tax referendum confirmed that the Nays prevailed. An additional 11 votes were found, breaking six for and five against the tax, which lost by 10 votes.

The counting machines mistakenly rejected 11 ballots. The machines might have malfunctioned — my cursory review of the literature suggests the error rate in well maintained optical scanning counters is one in 5,000 to 10,000 ballots — but we don’t know that they did. A machine may function perfectly, yet reject a ballot on which the voter’s intent is clear but not marked in a manner the machine can recognize (see 44.3.2402 Determining a Valid Vote in Manually Counting and Recounting Paper Ballots). For example, the voter didn’t blacken the oval, but circled For or Against.

The closeness of the vote will encourage the county leaders to run the referendum again, believing they can use the next two years to make the case for the tax. There will be a temptation to put the issue to the voters in the primary election of 2016, but that would be a mistake. The best chance of passage will be in the 2016 general election.

So why did voters reject the 911 tax? Four reasons, I think.

1. It was proposed fairly close to the election, leaving little time to campaign for it and perhaps causing voters to think the county was trying to sneak the tax through without a full discussion. Tax proposals don’t pass themselves. The default position of the voters is NO. Proponents of a new tax must make a convincing case for it. That didn’t happen.


2. An emergency services tax was on the ballot for Kalispell, where the 911 tax did not do well. Kalispell voters may have been irked by what they saw as a sneaky last minute double whammy, as a continuation of a never ending pile-on of taxation.


3. An uneasiness about an improving but still uncertain economy, in which the benefits of the recovery have not been enjoyed much by voters on the lower end of the income scale. A $25 per year tax might seem like chicken feed to county officials, but it might wipe out the annual cost of living adjustment of someone on Social Security.


4. A sense among voters that the people behind the campaign to fund the new 911 center may have lied about future costs to ensure that the 2008 bond passed. I supported that bond measure, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have opposed it.